Silicon Valley’s Most Hated New Product Is a Glorified Vending Machine

“Bodega” just had what one founder called “the absolute worst startup launch PR story in the history of startup launch PR stories.”

The fable of Juicero—the well-funded and now-dead Silicon Valley start-up that produced an eponymous $400 smart juicer—has apparently failed as a cautionary tale, too. On Wednesday morning, two former Google employees unveiled their new concept: Bodega, a series of “five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store,” which work by connecting to an app that charges your credit card if you take something out of the box. If this sounds like a vending machine, or perhaps a hotel mini-bar, that’s because it is. In a splashy story in Fast Company, the two former Google employees explain that they’ve received funding from “senior executives at Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Google”—about $2.5 million in funding, actually—with hopes of installing thousands of their kiosks in gyms, dorms, and apartment buildings. The end goal of Bodega is to collect data about its customers in specific areas, and then “use machine learning to constantly reassess the 100 most-needed items in that community.”

Between a clumsy attempt at appropriating bodega culture—the company’s logo is a nod to bodega cats—and a baffling logistics and business model, the Internet swiftly lit up with critiques of the company.

Filling its pantry boxes with hundreds of different kinds of products will make it hard to keep up with unpredictable demand, she writes, particularly when the boxes are user-customized and have hundreds, if not thousands, of different items in small quantities. Buying product at a high-enough volume to offset the logistics costs will prove challenging, particularly if the company can’t restock quickly enough. It also raises a number of questions: where are the start-up’s warehouses? Who are the people doing the work? Are they employees or contractors?

To hear McDonald tell it, the goal is to unseat actual bodegas, the corner stores that appear on every block in coastal cities like New York City and Los Angeles, a convenience store-slash-deli often run by immigrant families. “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,” McDonald told Fast Company. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

McDonald responded to the mounting criticism later Wednesday in a Medium post, the apology vehicle of choice for rueful start-up founders. “Is it possible we didn’t fully understand what the reaction to the name would be?” co-founder Paul McDonald wrote. “Yes, clearly. The name Bodega sparked a wave of criticism on social media far beyond what we ever imagined. … It’s clear that we may not have been asking the right questions of the right people.”

The fable of Juicero—the well-funded and now-dead Silicon Valley start-up that produced an eponymous $400 smart juicer—has apparently failed as a cautionary tale, too. On Wednesday morning, two former Google employees unveiled their new concept: Bodega, a series of “five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store,” which work by connecting to an app that charges your credit card if you take something out of the box. If this sounds like a vending machine, or perhaps a hotel mini-bar, that’s because it is. In a splashy story in Fast Company, the two former Google employees explain that they’ve received funding from “senior executives at Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Google”—about $2.5 million in funding, actually—with hopes of installing thousands of their kiosks in gyms, dorms, and apartment buildings. The end goal of Bodega is to collect data about its customers in specific areas, and then “use machine learning to constantly reassess the 100 most-needed items in that community.”